Stuff You Should Know - Selects: Who Committed the 1912 Villisca Ax Murders?

Episode Date: February 25, 2023

In a small town in Iowa in 1912 eight people were murdered in the grisliest of ways while they slept. Local reputations were ruined when accusations flew, but could a drifting serial killer working across the Midwest have been behind it? Learn all about it with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I am Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. This season, we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting a narcissist before they spot you. Each week, you'll hear stories from survivors who

have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and their process of healing. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, it's me, Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen a really unsettling episode on the Voliska Axe murders, one of the most unsettling murders in the history of American true crime. It's from 2017, and it's a good one. But fair warning, hopefully you have a strong constitution, because a lot of the stuff we talk about is not nice. Anyway, enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

There's Jerry. Put the three of us together. Add a little mystery. A lot of mayhem. You got Stuff You Should Know. And one axe. Yeah. Axe. How many is this three? We got Lizzie Borden. Yep. Hintekai Effect. Yep. And then this one. I couldn't think of any more. Well, I looked, it's funny, because I looked, I was like, I wonder if we could do a spin-off show just on axe murders. And Wikipedia had 30 listed. I'm surprised that's it. There's like 10 mentioned in this article alone. Well, we'll see why there are so many axe murders. This whole researching the Velisca axe murder kind of solved a question I've had that I didn't realize I knew had. How to pronounce Velisca? We just settled that by calling the Velisca town hall.

I know. That was a pretty great moment. Right before we recorded, I was like, are you sure it isn't Velisca? Josh called the town hall and lied. Well, it was kind of a bet that she settled. Yeah. We just never put money on it. So if you are, whoever answers the phone at the Velisca town hall, first of all. Thank you. You got a call today. So congratulations. And second of all, you just spoke to an internet celebrity. I don't know, man. I think Velisca is on the map and it is 100% because of this murder. Well, if you just type in Velisca, almost all you see is stuff about the axe murder.

Well, yeah, the site Velisca, Iowa.com is entirely dedicated to this axe murder. It's a pretty big deal. Yeah. No, it's just, it doesn't mention it at all, but all the copy is just in the outline of the shape of an axe. They just talk about like their boys club and stuff that they're doing their 4th of July parade, but it's in the shape of an axe. The population in elevation isn't a drop of blood coming off of the axe. Yeah, it's his population not as much as it was on June 9th. That's morbid. 1912. Did you, did you hear about this before? Well, I think after Hinterkai fact, we had some emails from probably local,

Iowans. Sure. Iowans? Iowans? Iowenianites. Saying, hey, you guys should, if you're into the, not into axe murders, but. Get a load of this. If you're into reporting on grizzly crimes, you should check out the one we had in 1912. Yeah. They were right, man. This is, ooh. So, before we get into it, I think it goes without saying listeners that this is a very horrific grizzly crime that we're going to talk about in some detail. Right. So, listen at your own discretion. Axe murder is in the title, everybody. Yeah. Just want to make sure we cover ourselves there.

This is one of the most brutal crimes in American history. Yeah. And a lot of people don't know about it. Man. Well, let's, let's, let's stop jabbering and get this, climbing. Okay. All right. Where did, where was, where was this from, by the way? Well, one of the articles we researched was from Mike Dash of the Smithsonian magazine. They do great work. Great work. There's another guy named, and named Ed Eperly, who we have to give a shout out to who has like a whole site called Ask Ed, that's dedicated to this murder. You guys researched it for like 55 years or something

like that. Did he write one of the two books, probably? Sure. Yeah. He's widely known as the expert on the Voliska Axe murder. He knows everything there is to know. And he's got a really fascinating site. If you're even remotely into true crime and this thing floats your boat, go check out Ed's site and you will just spend days pouring over. Yeah. One thing I realized in researching this was it was way easier to get away with murder than 1912. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of agreement that had this been done today. Yeah. They would have caught the guy very quickly. Sure. But yeah, 1912, it was like, you wear gloves and you just confounded their only means of detection,

basically. It's not from an eyewitness. Pretty much. Yeah. So we keep saying 1912, specifically, like you said, June 9th, 1912. Well. June 10th. Well, it was one of those things where it crossed over into midnight. Right. So June 9th, 10th. Depends on if you're still at partying. Potato, potato, Voliska, Volisa, right? Yeah. But at 508 East Second Street in Voliska, Iowa, which is in the county of Montgomery, in the southeast of the state, I believe. Not as far from here as I thought. No. I just looked on a map and I was like, wait, I was there. I thought Iowa was like basically in Canada. No. Huh. Where is it? It's more in the middle of the country. I did not realize that. Like it doesn't look further west

than like Dallas. I can believe that, but it was the north that gets you, the northern, the northward direction. That's what gets you. Sure. So on this night, June 9th, 10th, 1912, in this little house, there were eight people sleeping. There were a mom and a dad. Yeah. Joe and Sarah Moore. Uh-huh. And then there are four kids over their names, Charles. I believe Herman, Catherine, Boyd, and Paul. Right. And then downstairs, there were two additional people sleeping in the house, little Lena and Aina Stillinger. And they were just having to sleep over, right? Yeah. They were friends of Catherine, the oldest daughter or the only daughter, I guess, of the Moors. And the whole group had been at church. They were Presbyterians and they had been at

church that day. It was Sunday for a special Children's Day Mass that Mrs. Moore had helped put on and the kids had all participated in. Sure. And at that mass, Catherine had asked her two friends, Lena and Aina, the sisters, to spend the night. And so they came back home with the Moors from the Children's Day Mass. And by I think 10 or 1030, they were all at home in bed and the lights were out and the house was settled in dark. Yeah. Man, the Stillinger girls. I mean, this is all very sad, but anytime I hear of a fateful turn, like, oh yeah, we just spent the night there that night and things go bad. It always, I don't know, bothers me more. Yeah, for sure. Twists of fate are terrible, especially when they result in terrible deaths. So very late at night,

like you said, after midnight, someone crept in to the back of the house, which was not locked. That's up for debate. Oh, yeah. All right. Locked or unlocked. They got in without raising suspicion. Right. Yeah. Two-story house. And this is a small town. This is, there were, I don't even think, 2,000 people living there then and I think even less now than there were back then. Yeah. One of those places. So this person, and I think all accounts we can safely say it was a man, creeps in this house with an axe from the property. Yeah, it was Joe Moore's own axe. Yeah. And as we will see, apparently they call these weapons of convenience because back in the day, every single house in the US had an axe, like in the front or backyard. That just explained it. That was the

question I didn't realize I'd had. Why were there so many axe murderers at a certain period of time in American history? It was because everybody had an axe. Yeah. And you would leave it just, you know, like chopped into the stump that you use as the chopping block or whatever. It'd be like a weapon of convenience. Yeah. These days you would have to kill people with like a mailbox. Right. Just something that everyone has. Like a silicone spatula. Or a high speed internet cable. Yeah. Choke somebody with that. Yeah. Okay. All joking aside. So this dude creeps in there. He's got this axe. He gets, and this is very key here, he gets the lamp, an oil lamp from the dresser inside the house. He takes off the chimney,

the glass, you know, chimney and takes it off, bends the wick in half. So the flame is smaller, lights the lamp and then turns it down really low and then commences creeping. Yeah. With an axe in hand in this low light oil lamp and the other chimney lamp, which we'll see is a big clue. Yeah. So he goes up the stairs apparently. So he passes the stillinger girls first. Yep. Goes up the stairs. He passes the children's bedroom and then opposite, I believe the landing from the children's bedroom are Joe and Sarah's room or is Joe and Sarah's room and they're sleeping. And he sets the oil lamp down, I believe at the foot of the bed and he raises the axe over his head and using the flat, the flat end, flat side of the axe, not the sharp blade side,

but the other side. He delivers a blow to Joe's head. Joe, I believe, was lying on his back even though Smithsonian article says something different. Yeah. Raised it so high, he even gouged the ceiling, correct? Yeah. Bought it down hard on Joe's head. Probably killed him instantly from that one blow. Yeah. Then apparently he didn't disturb Sarah at all because he did the same thing to her and both of them were found in a position that they would have been sleeping and there wasn't like the bedclothes were ruffled. Their arm wasn't up to defend themselves. Right. They died in their sleep. It appeared, right? Yes. So he kills the parents either immediately or they die probably pretty quickly. Right. Leaves the room and goes next door

and this is really just almost too awful to talk about, but he kills all the children in their sleep. One by one, but again without waking any of them. Yeah. By the time he got to the stillinger girls downstairs, it seemed evidence points to the fact that they may have awakened finally. One of them, the older one, Lina, I believe is the older one. And then he dispatches with both of them in the same manner. Yeah. Grizzly awful, awful murder. So that's bad enough, right? This guy just went around and murdered eight people, six of them children under the age of 12. Yeah. Or 12 or under with the blunt end of an axe. That's bad enough. But then it just gets a million times worse. And this is probably why this axe murder is just part of American history,

whether we like it or not. So what the guy does next is, well, he took the axe and he flips it over and he takes the sharp side and he goes around and he starts bashing everybody's head in, one by one. Apparently, Joe was later founded to have been struck as many as 30 times in the head with the axe. Yeah. Just one by one, he went around and completely caved in the head and face of all of his victims methodically throughout the house after they were dead, which is a bizarre, horrible thing to do. Yeah. So then it gets a little bit strange. He goes around to the rooms and all over the house really and does different things in each one. He covers windows with sheets and things. He covers mirrors. Yeah. All the mirrors in the house were covered. He

covered the faces of, I believe, all the victims, right? Yeah. One way or another, I believe all of their faces were covered with either sheets or pillowcases. Or I think in the case of the girls, he pulled their dresses up over their faces. Yeah. We'll talk about that in a second. Yeah. It's very... I think in the serial killer or psychopath mode, though, I've heard of stuff like that before, though. Right. You get the idea that the murderer doesn't want the victim looking at him, which may also explain why he bashed their faces in, who knows. So the guy apparently hangs out for a little while. He does other weird things, though, the bacon. He grabbed a two-pound slab of bacon. Yeah. And I saw elsewhere that there was another

slab of bacon found in the house, but there was at least one two-pound slab of bacon that he wrapped in a dish towel and then left on the floor of one of the bedrooms. So weird. There was a bowl of bloody water that was later found. He washed himself off. He washed off the axe, although he left it behind. And he apparently hung out for a little while in the house before leaving, sometime before 5 a.m. So the murders took place around midnight. Yeah. And then come 5 a.m., the house is dark still. It's 5 a.m., so that's not the weirdest thing, although we're talking about Iowa. So plenty of people were up at 5, including the neighbor, a woman named Mary Peckham. And she noticed that there wasn't anybody up at the house, which was a little odd. It was a Monday

morning now. And by 7, she thought it was just downright eerie, that there was no sign of life at the house. She went over and let the Moors chickens out so that they could peck around and feed. She called Joe Moore's store and said, hey, has Joe showed up and found from the employee that he hadn't. And finally, one of those two gets in touch with a guy named Ross Moore, Joe Moore's brother. And Ross comes over and unlocks the door. The front door is locked. And he goes inside and he comes almost immediately rushing back out, calling for the local marshal to be called. Yeah. Basically, Hank Horton is the marshal's name. He gets him on the scene. And this, this is where things just kind of go berserk. It's such a small town,

such a grisly crime. Any chances of preserving a crime scene, and this is 1912, I don't even know how much a small town like this knows about preserving a crime scene at the time. But any hopes were lost within those first few hours after the discovery because by all accounts, there were a hundred or more people that went through that house from doctors to coroners to investigators to just townspeople that were allowed to just go in there and check things out. Yeah. So the first group that comes with the marshal, Hank Horton, right, was two doctors and a minister. Jay Clark Cooper. Right, great doctor name. Jay Clark Cooper and Edgar Hough and Wesley Ewing, who was the minister of the church. They were the first contingent to make

it into the house after Ross Moore came running out. Yeah. So they go in and they know enough to not disturb things too much. Yeah. Another guy gets brought in, L.A. Lindquist, he's the coroner. Yep. He tries to take some notes about the crime scene, but the person who got the most information was another doctor. His name was... FS Williams. Yeah, FS Williams was the one who examined the body and at a later inquest, he had the most details to offer about the bodies, the positions, all that stuff. So when those guys walked in, they were at least well versed enough to know, not disturb things as much as possible or at least more than the townspeople knew. Yeah. And FS Williams allegedly came out of the house pretty shaken and said, don't go in their

boys or you'll regret it to your last day. Yeah. And the townspeople said, nuts to you, we're going inside. We want to see some dead bodies. And they all regretted it probably till their last day. Yeah, because they not only messed with the crime scene, they poked around. There was supposedly the town drunk took fragments of Joe Moore's skull as mementos. Like the crime scene was toast, like you said. If it could have ever been preserved, it was toast. And even the local drugist showed up with his camera to help preserve the crime scene because he heard that the townspeople were tramping all over it. And Ross Moore, not understanding what he was doing, threw the guy out, thought he was just being a ghoul trying

to get pictures. So the crime scene is utterly and completely lost. Yeah. And one of the things about Baleska, I almost said Vassila, is that it was a train town. There were about 30 trains every day that went through there. And so by this time, unless this person was local and maybe hiding out locally, by all accounts, the murder had probably hopped a train and was out of there by that time. But they didn't realize this until they had already released some bloodhounds. They searched the countryside. There was like a pretty big search to find whoever did this. And they didn't find anybody. So the town was just terrified. Town of 2,000 people, eight, including six children had just been murdered with an axe in your town. And now the

sun's starting to go down and nobody's been caught. All right. So let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about suspect number one right after this. I'm Dr. Romany and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. Narcissists are everywhere and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health. In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was love bombed by the Tinder swindler. The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did. And that's even way worse than the money he took. But I am here to help. As a licensed psychologist and

survivor of narcissistic abuse myself, I know how to identify the narcissist in your life. Each week, you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up y'all, this is Questlove and, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends. Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Unpaid Bill, and we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists.

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Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeart Radio app. Have a podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Rosie O'Donnell, and I've got a new podcast called Onward with me, Rosie O'Donnell, on iHeart. I'm 60 years old now, believe that? Yes, it's the truth. So I figure two thirds of my life are done, zero to 30, 30 to 60. And now I'm in the 60 to 90 if I'm lucky. Mostly this part of my life is just about moving forward. And I thought, what a wonderful way to do it.

With the podcast that I can sit down here in my home, with people I love and admire, people I've worked with, people I've gotten to be friends with, and some family friends that feel like the real deal. Like who, you might ask? Natasha Leone, Jennifer Lewis, Ricky Lake, Fran Drescher, Sharon Glass, Kathy Griffin, Cameron Mannheim. The list goes on and on. Listen to Onward with Rosie O'Donnell, a proud part of the outspoken podcast network on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so suspect number one might be a little surprising when you first hear that he was a state senator, very well respected by some as a local businessman. And a very prominent Methodist seems to town was pretty sharply divided between Methodist and Presbyterian, you know, those days. That stuff mattered to those people. And his name was Frank Jones. And Methodist immediately said, no, he's got to be innocent.

This is a fine upstanding member of our church. Presbyterians are like, no, it's got to be him. And at first I was like, well, why would it be the state senator? None of this makes sense. There were a couple of big things that made people believe that he could be the guy. Joe Moore worked for him for seven years and was one of his best salesman on his farm equipment team. And apparently he left in 1907 and was not too happy with the work hours,

which were 16 hour days, six days a week. Who would be? It's like us. And then set up a rival business and even took one of the clients, the John Deere company. Yeah, that was a big one. I'm sure. So big that when Sarah Peckham called Joe Moore's employee to tell him the news. Joe Moore's employee called the John Deere people in Omaha to let them know.

Oh, sure. They were like the third people called after the bodies were discovered. So he takes John Deere with him. So this set up an obvious rivalry. And worse than that, apparently, I don't know if this is super confirmed, but at least the rumor was that Joe Moore had slept with Jones' daughter-in-law. From what I understand, beyond a shadow of a doubt that's understood is true. That's true.

Yeah. So slept with his daughter-in-law who apparently kind of had several affairs in town and was not very discreet. Yeah, apparently, according to Mike Dash at Smithsonian, she used to set up her meet and greets over the phone. I think it's called a liaison. Oh, that's right. Over the phone.

And this was at a time when there was a switchboard operator running the phones in the town. Yeah, they could listen in on everything. Who just sat there and listened. Yeah. And this lady obviously didn't care. So apparently, it was pretty well known that Joe Moore had had an affair with F.F. Jones' daughter-in-law, which is huge. She put those two things together.

They were not friends. The fact that apparently they used to cross to the other side of the street to keep from encountering one another. That's a big deal in that town, in a small town, right? So suspicion fell onto F.F. Apparently, from what I understand, within a couple hours of the bodies being discovered. Yeah, and suspicion not that he may have done it, that Jones was actually the killer, but maybe Jones, because he was 57 years old and probably had some pretty good money, clearly.

Oh, yeah. He was wealthy. He was building a bank overseeing his new bank being built when he got the news that the bodies were being built. When you're building the bank, you're rolling in it. Yeah. So everyone thought that he probably hired somebody out to kill him. And that was a very, the Burns detective agency that was a detective named James Wilkerson,

who said, you know what, I think you're right. I think he hired someone. I think that man's name was William Mansfield. William Blackie Mansfield. It was already, no, he wasn't already. He would later be, I believe, convicted of an axe murder himself. Yeah, which is probably one of the chief reasons he was suspect. Well, no, that came a couple of years after, I believe.

That was 1914 or 15 that he murdered his wife, her parents, and their child, his child with an axe. Right? Yeah. This guy was a bad dude, but there was one problem with James Wilkerson's theory. Blackie Mansfield had an airtight alibi. He was in Illinois hundreds of miles away when the crimes occurred. Not only did the foreman vouch for him, but the payroll record showed very clearly that he had not been in Velisca that day and couldn't have done it.

Yeah. So he was exonerated, but a lot of townspeople still thought that, you know, how it was back then, and still is today to a certain degree. Sure, especially in a small town. Yeah. People were convinced that he was the guy, and a lot of people probably went to their graves thinking that. So even though Chuck Mansfield was exonerated, and like you said, a lot of people thought that Jones, FF Jones apparently went by FF, did have something to do with it.

The Stillinger Girls' father and Ross Moore, Joe Moore's brother, both thought FF Jones was behind this. Right. And Wilkerson made it like his personal mission to take Jones down. And apparently ruined his political career, cost him reelection to the state Senate. I would think that probably happened anyway, just from suspicion. Maybe, but I think like there's something between townspeople suspecting you and a detective like bringing evidence against you and getting a grand jury to indict you.

It was like the good old days when you could be suspected of an ex-murder and still win a Senate seat. Right, exactly. But Jones, he didn't win reelection. And yeah, apparently they're dying days. Some people assume that it was him behind it. Another candidate, candidate suspect. Sure. And candidate's not the right word.

Lynn George Jaclyn Kelly, the man with four names. He went by George Kelly, though. He was an Englishman, which was probably a little weird at the time. Sure. He lived in there. No one had ever seen an Englishman in Iowa. Maybe. He was a preacher, though, and it says in this Smithsonian article,

a known sexual deviant, he definitely had some mental health problems. But there are some things in his case where it sort of were suspicious and others that made him not a great suspect, one of which he was a little guy. He was five to 119 pounds. So maybe not the best suspect for... Swinging an ax like that. Although, you know, he could have been strong as an ox. You never know.

Sure. Thumbs those little guys. Yeah, but they're usually good with, like, jujitsu sleeper holds, rather than ax swinging, you know? They just scramble up on top of you before you know what their legs are around your neck and you're losing consciousness. Yeah, their thumbs are in your eyeballs, that kind of thing. Right.

Yeah, so fair enough. But he was left-handed, and the coroner, Lindquist, did say that, you know, from their analysis, as rudimentary as that might be in 1912, that he could probably at least determine that it was a left-handed assailant. From the blood spatter, I believe. Yeah, that's how you do. On the walls. So good for them for being that advanced.

So there were some other things that that implicated George Kelly. One, he was in Voliska. He was a traveling preacher. He and his wife toured around, and they were in Voliska the day of the murder. They were actually at the children's service that the Moors and the Stillinger girls were at. Again, this guy was a sex maniac, is what he was known as. Yeah, I kind of wonder about that. And does that mean he liked to have sex?

I guess there were, he placed an ad, and this was in the 1910s. He placed an ad in the Omaha World Herald looking for a stenographer who would be willing to pose as a model. And when one woman named Jessamine Hodgson replied to his ad, he sent her a letter, and apparently it was quite lewd, so much so that the court that heard the case against him said that it was so obscene, lewd, lascivious, and filthy as to be offensive to this honorable court and improper to be spread upon the record thereof. I really want to know what was in that letter.

Well, one of the things was that the lady would be required to type in the nude. Yeah. This is the 1910s. No, that's what I'm saying. I wonder how it would be judged by today's standard. Oh, although, I mean, by today's standard, if you sent a potential job candidate a letter that said, I'm going to require you to be typing in the nude, you would get in some trouble for that. Sure, I just don't know that you would say it was obscene, lewd, and lascivious. No, I'm with you.

They'd say that's kink. But I think the, so okay, George Kelly was a kinky traveling preacher who had his wife in tow. And he was in Velisca at the time of the murders. And he left that next morning on a train. Right. But there was supposedly a witness that said that he had a very incriminating statement when he got off of that train that very morning. Yeah.

He apparently referenced the murders, but he had left town before they found out about the murders. But then later on, those people recanted those statements, correct? Right. Right. So when, when Frank Jones, FF Jones had a grand jury brought to hear evidence against him, he was exonerated. Same thing, not with George Kelly, actually, I should say he was actually the only person to ever go to trial for these murders. And he was tried twice.

The first time the jury found 11 to one in his favor, the second jury acquitted him entirely. The evidence against him was just too flimsy and it probably wasn't him. Yeah. I mean, the, the, the idea was they were like, he was at that church service. He's a pervert. He saw these kids in the service. He went back and peeked into their house and camped out in their barn. Right. And the evidence there was there were some hay bales in the barn that had depressions, as if someone had been laying on them.

And if you'd laid down in one of them, there was a peephole right there in the barn where you could see the house. This is all pretty flimsy. There was also though, I think one of the reasons why the case was brought against him, he was specifically tried for the murder of Lena Stillinger. And that's, that's noteworthy because although they don't say in the official court record directly, yeah, that she may have been sexually assaulted or that some sort of sex crime had been committed against her.

Supposedly she had been found with her night clothes hiked up over her waist, like above her waist. Her undergarments have been taken off and stuffed under the bed. And then her, her legs had been arranged so that her genitalia was prominent. Right. That was done after she had been murdered. And I think that's one of the reasons why they suspected George Kelly, because to add a sexual dimension to this brutal murder, they said, well, this guy's just, just enough of a sex maniac for that to be possible. Yeah. Oh, I forgot about this fact though.

He actually returned a week later and posed as a Scotland Yard detective so he could get a tour of the house. That is so George Kelly. Well, it's definitely one of those things that makes you go, wait a minute, return to the scene of the crime. You lied to get in there and look at the house. Right. But apparently everyone wanted to go look at the house.

Yeah. So it's- And plus, what's posing? You know, we've seen so many like cartoony movies that like somebody gets like the, the deer stalker hat and a pipe and says they're from Scotland Yard. Posing could be like somebody saying like, oh, you must be from Scotland Yard and like grunting in the affirmative. Yeah, that's true.

I guess that technically constitutes posing in the real world. Apparently signed a confession. Oh yeah. That was a big one too. Yeah. But I mean, the confession literally said, I killed the children upstairs first and the children downstairs last. I knew God wanted me to do it this way. Slay utterly came to mind and I picked up the acts, went into the house and killed them. But, you know, he took it back later.

I was like, yeah, all that very specific stuff I said about killing this family. Right. I didn't really do it. So he was exonerated. So, so far, the little town of Aliska has looked around and said, we couldn't find any tramps. So who's the person that hated Joe more the most? FF Jones.

Well, it wasn't him. Who's the weirdest pervert we can find who is in town at the time? Yeah, that Englishman. George Kelly. It wasn't him. So they didn't know. A lot of people went to their graves dying, not knowing what happened. And we still don't know what happened.

But with the hindsight of, I guess, modern forensic techniques, modern profiling and the work of dedicated historians like Ed Epperly, we have something of a clearer picture emerging and that picture seems to be centering on the serial killer. And we'll talk about that theory more right after this. I'm Dr. Romany and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. Narcissists are everywhere and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health. In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was love-bombed by the tinder

swindler. The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did. And that's even way worse than the money he took. But I am here to help. As a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself, I know how to identify the narcissist in your life. Each week, you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships,

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All right, so we've ruled out these local suspects, local-ish, I guess, in Kelly's case. And now the modern take on this is that this was a serial killer because in 1911 and 1912, there were a lot of acts murders in the Midwest, at least 10 everywhere from Colorado Springs to Ellsworth, Kansas, and many of them had similar traits. Yeah, like some very startlingly similar traits, right? But not all of them, and some of them are like, and we'll go through these, but some are like, well, in five of them, these same things happen, and two of them, these same things happen. So it makes me wonder if they're kind of grouping too many of these together.

This does, Ed Epperly actually whittles it down to five, including Voliska. Oh, I thought it was three, was it five? Five. So there's three that happened in 1911. There was one that happened in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that supposedly kicked the whole thing off, followed by Momma in Illinois. I forgot the S is silent. Yeah, right? Yeah. And then Ellsworth, Kansas. Then there was one in Paola, Kansas, and then the last one in Voliska. And those five crimes have some similarities that make them really, really suspicious. The idea of just like five different people, or even a couple of different people, separately committing these crimes.

And as Ed Epperly puts it kind of dismissively, the idea that these were local vendettas or that people were like- Like an argument over farming or something. Right. Yeah. That's not what these crimes reflect at all. They reflect the work of a, like just a straight up nut job psychopath who are few and far between. So the fact that these things occurred between October of 1911 and June of 1912 suggests strongly that there was one person doing them. Yeah. Well, that was that final one in Columbia, Missouri in December, 1912. And one of the theories is that a man named Henry Lee Moore killed Georgia Moore in Columbia, Missouri, who was his mother, Mary Wilson. So is that the guy? No.

It would be weird to commit a series of murders and then finish up with your own family. Right. Usually it's the other way around. Yeah. Right. So like if you're going to go off on a killing spree, you usually start, you practice on your family first. Yeah, like a recital. You get a feel for it, right? This guy, Henry Lee Moore, aside from having three names, is not a good suspect for the serial killer, right? He apparently wanted the deeds to his family house. And like you said, it's very rare for a serial killer to go back. You know the deal with the three names. They don't all have three names.

No, I know, but so many of them do. Well, no, the news reports it that way to distinguish them from every other Henry Moore in the world. Gotcha. So like everyone's always like, serial killers have three names. No, they're just reported that way. That's awesome. Yeah. I love it when things are just explained. Yeah. I wrapped up in a nice little bow. Thanks for that. Like Lee Harvey Oswald, I think went by Lee Oswald. I think you're right. Yeah. Yeah. So if anyone ever writes a story about Charles Wayne Bryant, we're in trouble.

Oh, yeah. I'm in trouble. No, I wouldn't kill you. Thanks, man. I wouldn't kill you either. Hey, you want a shake on it? Jerry witnessed? So the Henry Lee Moore thing, he's almost like a red herring. Like a lot of people say, well, he was the one, he was the serial killer behind it because the serial murders started right after he got out of prison in Kansas. Yes. And then they ended right after he got caught in Columbia, Missouri with his family. Yeah. I mean, kind of makes sense. It does, but that's where the whole thing really begins and ends.

So a lot of people say, well, it wasn't Henry Lee Moore, so it wasn't a serial killing. Well, plus, sorry, but his killing, his own family was about obtaining the deeds to his family house. Yeah. That's what I was saying. Oh, so that was greed motivated. Right. Okay. Sorry about that. Not, not a serial psychopathic sex based serial killer spree, right? This guy was just a jerk. So since Henry Lee Moore is associated with the serial murder theory, once somebody then finds out that it wasn't Henry Lee Moore, they stopped thinking it was a serial murder. Right. And that really says not so fast. Wait, wait, wait.

Just because Henry Lee Moore is out of the equation, it doesn't mean there's not a serial killer involved. Yeah. He's like, consider the similarities between these five cases and they're pretty thick, right? In a couple of the cases, there were oil lamps found where chimney, the chimneys were removed and set aside and the wicks were bent in half to keep the light low. Yeah. That's a big one. Axes were used in four of the five, but he says that's just probably a matter of convenience. A pipe, I think, was used in the momoth Illinois case, which is, again, an implement of convenience

too, right? Sure. Don't have an axe handy? Go for a lead pipe, right? Yeah. You probably didn't bring that with you. Right. Tell them about the mirrors, Chuck. Well, I mean, at several of these places, the mirrors were covered up. I mean, that's a big one. Mirrors and windows. And in one of the places, the telephone was covered. And the thought there is, is that, like you said earlier, like they don't want the victims to be watching them even after death or to be seen and the mirrors and windows being covered. But the phone apparently, it was

one of those old box phones on the wall that you crank and it has the two, it sort of looks like a face when you look at it. It has like, it looks like two eyes and a nose. And so the thought was that that even looks like a face to the Drange serial killer. So they'll cover that up as well. Right. Because nothing else makes much sense. You know, you're not going to, in 1912, you're not getting phone calls after midnight. You probably, probably don't get more than a couple of phone calls a week in 1912. Right. Most people only have phones.

Yeah. And throwing a sheet over it wouldn't like disable it anyway. No. There was a another female victim, a young female victim in Monmouth, who was found basically the same way that Lena Stillinger was found. Yeah. With her nightgown thrown up over waste and her undergarments removed. And apparently there was a similarity in, I believe, Monmouth and Velisca where, and one other town too, where the killer was, went on to try to kill again. Yeah. This was the most interesting to me. Either successfully did kill again. There was one where he went to an adjacent house whose

backyard connected the first murder house and then went in and killed another family right afterward. That was Colorado Springs. And then in Velisca, the telephone operator who was like sleeping in the telephone switchboard headquarters. Because no calls were coming through. She reported the doorknob being tried about two hours after the more house members were murdered. Yeah. Like heard footsteps come up to the door, try to open it, and then heard the footsteps leave. Yeah. That's a little shaky. But the last one was the one that kind of sent the chill up my spine. It was the one in Kansas, specifically, you said Paola. I bet you there are people,

they're laughing because it's probably pronounced Paola or something. Probably. But who knows, Paola, Kansas, there was a second family, Mrs. Longmire, the Longmire family. They were awakened. She and her daughter at about midnight, to the sound of broken glass, went downstairs and saw a dude in their dining room who had just broken oil lamp chimney and then got the heck out of there through a window. They actually saw a guy. So think about that, Chuck. Think about that. They saw, they woke up and saw the man who was about to probably bludgeon them all to death with an axe, leaving their house. Yeah. And these were all train towns. Yeah. So they were all linked by train depots. So by all accounts, there was a

train going serial killer for a couple of years in the Midwest. Yeah. Killing people, hopping trains. Yeah. Never, ever caught. And that nuts. It is nuts. And that the Voliska axe murders were probably one of his crazy, but we'll never know. No. You know, when you say stuff like that, or when you see stuff like that in print too, like we'll never know who it was. It makes you wonder, like, what kind of technology are we going to have in the future? Like, will we never know? Or are we going to come up with something one day where we're like, oh, it was this guy. Yeah. Like now we know. You know, who knows? The future knows. That's who knows. We should do one on Ed Gein. Okay. That's like kind of one of the big, big ones we haven't

covered. Okay. I got a couple more too. Oh, yeah. I don't want to, I don't want to even tease them yet. Okay. Okay. True crime. Maybe we'll do one in like this October. Okay. We used to do multiple kind of creepy episodes. I think we did last time too, last October. Yeah. All right. We'll look forward to another ghoulish serial killer type thing. Okay. Yeah. We did Hinter K. Fek, I think. Oh, is that last? I think so, yeah. Okay. If you want to know more about the Voliska axe murders, well, again, strongly recommend you go look up Ed Eperly. You can read the Smithsonian article, the axe murder who got away, which is great. And there were plenty of other articles that we relied on that we love. Thank you for those. In the meantime, you can also

hang out with us on HouseStuffWorks.com and our famous search bar. And since I said search bar, got it in there. It's time for Listener Mail. Hey guys, love the show. And now I have even more reason to promote your podcast to everyone I know. I work in a small family business with my cousin in this previous January. Started experiencing severe gastrointestinal issues. Oh, I love his email. Yeah. Remember this one? It was like from yesterday. Yeah. I won't go into detail, but for months afterward, he saw specialist after specialist hoping to find out the root, tested for Crohn's ulcers, IBS, everything under the sun, none of which had a positive result or diagnosis, couldn't focus on anything, no energy, took a ton of time away from work. He felt totally

lost and even sought the help of a psychologist because of his diminished work ethic, deteriorating quality of life. You see where this is going, people? I think listeners might know. And he was southern. One day last month, he was southern actually. He came in after a doctor's appointment and said he develops an iron-deficient anemia to add to his list of issues. At first, it sounded disconnected until, and I kid you, this is an all caps, I kid you not, Josh and Chuck, I was listening to your hookworm episode that day. Man, when you got to the part about the aggressive iron-deficient anemia, I lost my mind. I looked up hookworm infection symptoms, immediately brought it to my cousin and he had every last symptom. His doctor prescribed a medication and he is currently

being dewormed. From the first day he started his treatment, he had a noticeable increase in both mood and energy. I don't know how these symptoms could have slipped by a half dozen GPs and specialists, but I truly can't thank you both enough for your podcast and its wide range of topics. That is James in St. Pete, Florida. That is so awesome, man. Dude had hookworm. Can you believe it? Man. Thank you, James. And good luck to you, cousin. Way to go for being so smart to connect the dots, too. I think your cousin owes you a pizza or a beer or whatever you like. Maybe both. Yeah. Tripped a Chuck E. Cheese, drunk. If you want to get in touch with us to tell us an amazing story like James did, you can tweet to us, S-Y-S-K podcast, and you

can send us all an email, including Jerry, at stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much

time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet feel like a nightclub. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. My name is Joanne McNeill. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it. Listen to Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I am Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. This season, we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting a narcissist before

they spot you. Each week, you'll hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and their process of healing. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.